The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander Read Free Book Online

muskets and cartouch boxes, had been thrown into the boat,” Hamilton wrote, suggesting that what little supplies there were had been saved by chance. A daily ration was determined of three ounces of bread, two small glasses of water and one of wine, with the occasional addition of an ounce of portable soup, or cakes of dried soup, and half an ounce of essence of malt. Edwards’s plan was to sail for the Dutch East Indies settlement of Coupang, in Timor, the same port that had received Bligh and his company at the end of their ordeal in the Bounty ’s launch. The irony that the Pandora ’s boats were to replicate part of Bligh’s famous voyage is unlikely to have escaped anyone—least of all poor Thomas Hayward, who had been with Bligh and was thus about to embark on his second Pacific open-boat journey in a little more than two years. A voyage of some eleven hundred miles lay ahead.
     
     
     
    On August 31, the third day after the Pandora had struck the reef, the little squadron set sail, with Captain Edwards leading the way in his pinnace, followed by the red and blue yawls and the launch. The prisoners had been carefully apportioned among the vessels. Peter Heywood, in the launch under the sympathetic Lieutenant Corner, had drawn what was probably the happiest boat, while James Morrison, as he reported, “had the good or evil fortune, call it which you please to go in the Pinnace with Capt. Edwards.”
     
    Proceeding northwest, the little squadron now at last passed through the reef by way of a channel that, as Edwards reported to the Admiralty, was “better than any hitherto known”—a discovery that had come rather late in the day. In the morning of the following day, they came to the desolate, treeless coast of New Holland. Here, the parched men had the rare good fortune to find a spring rushing onto the beach. The prisoners in particular were tortured by the sun; their skin, pale and tender after five months of confinement, had quickly burned and blistered. Peter wrote, “[W]e appeared as if dipped in large tubs of boiling water.”
     
    The company passed the night off a small island, where they were awakened by the howling of dingoes, which they mistook for wolves. On the afternoon of September 2, they passed a series of distinctive islands that were recognized from Bligh’s account and a chart made during his boat voyage. By the evening, the boats were in sight of Cape York, the northernmost tip of New Holland, and the end of the strait. Ahead was the Indian Ocean and a one-thousand-mile run to Timor.
     
    “It is unnecessary to relate our particular sufferings in the Boats during our run to Timor,” wrote Edwards, with his usual literary sangfroid, “and is sufficient to observe that we suffered more from heat & thirst than from hunger.” The weather, at least, was good and the overloaded boats made satisfying progress. At dawn on the sixteenth the Dutch fort at Coupang, Timor, was at last hailed. Edwards had lost no men on this leg of the journey, although they had been reduced to drinking the blood of captured birds and their own urine.
     
    Backed by gentle, verdant, wooded hills, the small settlement of Coupang was built at the head of a deep natural harbor. It consisted of little more than a fort and a handful of houses, a church, a hospital and company stores serving a population of Dutch officials, Chinese merchants and Malay slaves. A European ship at anchor amid other small craft offered a comfortingly familiar sight. The Pandora ’s four boats hailed the fort, and the men were welcomed ashore.
     
    While the Pandora ’s officers and men were dispersed in different houses around the settlement, the prisoners were taken to the fort itself and put in stocks. Again, Edwards’s report makes no mention of the prisoners at all during this sojourn, but Morrison’s account is graphic: “Immediately on our landing Provisions were procured which now began to move our bodys and we were forced